Contemporary artist Ali Bezer believes in a version of the Gold Coast that doesn’t appear on postcards. Her home town, she says, is more complex than its glossy facade suggests.
Bezer’s newest installation, an undulating aluminium and bitumen sculpture called I Can Hear Water (2021), will show as part of Solid Gold: Artists from Paradise, the inaugural exhibition of a new $60.5m gallery that opens to the public on 8 May, part of cultural district Home of the Arts.
“The Gold Coast is a really natural place,” she says. “The biggest stereotype is that it’s culturally void. Hota proves that there is a huge art culture here, but it’s not weighed down by intellectualism. It’s more responsive to place and energies.”
Culture and nature have had a long but occasionally uneasy relationship in Australia’s sixth-largest city. The modern incarnation of this place, whose traditional custodians are the Yugambeh language group, was shaped first by the postwar leisure boom that imported elements of American surf culture, before waves of development brought an eruption of skyscrapers along the shoreline. In 2015, work started on the wider cultural precinct, championed by Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate, who – thanks to the city’s 2018 Commonwealth Games – saw the potential of cultural tourism.
From the outside, the six-storey contemporary art museum, designed by Melbourne architecture firm ARM, echoes these brash origins. Subtropical foliage. Shapes in block colours – green, orange, red, yellow – inspired by the Voronoi, a cellular pattern found in nature.
Inside the vantage is different. Descending the wooden staircase lit by subtle strips of neon, you might pause at floor-to-ceiling views of sprawling parklands, an outdoor soundstage and Evandale Lake, where visitors are encouraged to dip before or after an exhibition.
Beyond is a flash of the Nerang river, and the skyline at Surfers Paradise. The sense of light and space feels expansive. You can peer through a glass pane into a purpose-built area that houses art, not on display, from the $32m Gold Coast City Collection. The 4,500 works, collected by the Gold Coast city council since 1968, are assembled together at Hota gallery for the first time, and will be drawn from across future exhibitions.
Criena Gehrke, the chief executive of the Hota cultural precinct, wants the gallery to be as egalitarian as possible.
“We are trying to lean into what it’s like to be on the Gold Coast – we’re a sunny, active city that loves Pacific Fair,” laughs Gehrke, a Queensland native who relocated from Melbourne. “We’re open late Friday night, so you can come after work, have a drink, see some art – we want to give people an extended lifestyle as well.”
Hota is pronounced “hotter”, sure to raise eyebrows in Melbourne and Sydney. There’s a rooftop bar, called the Exhibitionist. Staff who look like they love their jobs wear pink shirts and denim. You won’t find audio guides, says the gallery’s director, Tracy Cooper-Lavery. “We want people to talk to one another,” she says. Gehrke and Cooper-Lavery also plan an ice-cream festival called Scoop.
But Hota’s ambitions are serious. Solid Gold will be followed by Lyrical Landscapes, surveying the work of William Robinson, a renowned painter who lives on the Gold Coast hinterland. Then, in November, comes the exclusive Contemporary Masters from New York: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, featuring Keith Haring, Richard Prince and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The highlight for me is Hota Collects: an exhibition spanning three galleries that draws together 100 works from the City Collection. The show – which includes Tracey Moffatt’s 1991 Pet Thang series, Charles Blackman’s 1974 painting On the Sand and in the Sea, Surfers, and Robinson’s The Rainforest (1990) – tells a story of Australian art unmediated by the state capitals. Newer works such as Vernon Ah Kee’s wegrewhere #2 (2009) explore the ways the Australian beach can exclude marginalised communities, or double as sites of conflict.
For Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, the fact that Hota isn’t hamstrung by its own legacy means that it can engage in the global movement to reimagine cultural institutions.
Nithiyendran’s new commission, Double-sided Avatar with Blue Figure (2021), greets visitors at the gallery’s lower entrance. The grinning, six-metre statue borrows its neon-and-fibreglass palette from Surfers’ technicolour architecture. It takes cues from guardian figures across Asia, but it’s also an antidote to the colonial figures that flank civic spaces.
“I was thinking about the kinds of people who are memorialised in these kinds of places,” he says.
As the Australian reported in April, not all locals are responding well to this work, and Tate had an unconventional solution: “Have another drink, keep doing it until you like it.” When I visit, two women have driven an hour to voice their disapproval. Gehrke listens patiently to their views.
“If you’re a true home, you make people feel welcome,” she says later. “You understand different cultures. Sometimes you have challenging conversations.”
Hota arrives at a turning point in Gold Coast history. The region is one of the country’s fastest-growing outside a capital city; according to an October 2019 ABC report the population is set to reach 1m by 2045. Almost one in three residents is overseas-born.
The acclaimed Japanese-Australian artist Hiromi Tango is a long-time resident of Tweed Heads. Last year 10 people she knew died from Covid. “Coming from Japan, having close friends in Asia, it was a regular thing,” she says.
During a lockdown walk, she saw a double rainbow. For her Hota gallery work, one of 19 commissions showing as part of Solid Gold, she created Healing Circles – Rainbow, which sits near works by Michael Candy and Samuel Leighton-Dore. The striped room accompanied by a meditation video uses cheery colours that invite viewers to sit with more complex ideas around healing and grief.
Judy Watson, a Waanyi artist from north-western Queensland, remembers camping in the hinterland as a girl. Her installation for Hota gallery, Nerung Ballun (Nerang River), Freshwater, Saltwater, is an outdoor garden, featuring sculptures by Quandamooka artists Libby Harward and Elisa Jane Carmichael. From above, it evokes the topography of the Nerang River pre-settlement.
“This was a beautiful area for water, water-loving vegetation, and there has been a lot of sandmining that has changed the way water moves through country,” she says. “I’m hoping that people can do weaving workshops, that elders can teach the names of plant species. It’s all [about] the process of transferring knowledge.”
